Kevin White

The late 1960s was an era of enormous possibility about what could be done at the city level, and that attracted a lot of talented people to work in dingy old city halls. In the spring of 1968, Kevin White, the new mayor of Boston, showed up at the Harvard Law Review banquet and said, "You should not serve the world of mammon. You should serve the world of public good." I took him seriously and went to work for him. White, who died Jan. 27 at 82, shepherded the city through the upheavals of court-ordered busing to integrate schools--his biggest...